Looted Painting's Odyssey Leads Next to the Block

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: August 3, 2006

Barely a week after the German government returned a 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of Jewish collectors who owned it before World War II, Christie's said yesterday that it would auction the work in New York on Nov. 8.

Experts estimate that the painting, ''Street Scene, Berlin,'' a colorful canvas of an urban crowd painted mainly in blues with a prostitute in a bright red dress toward the left, could sell for $18 million to $25 million. It is considered one of Kirchner's finest street scenes, painted at the height of his career.

The appetite for German and Austrian Expressionist art has grown in recent years, making the timing of the return of the Kirchner fortuitous for the seller. Only a decade ago many collectors, especially Americans, were simply not interested in Kirchner or other Expressionists, who were sold mostly in Europe.

''It's an aspect of art history that had been shunned, especially by critics like Clement Greenberg,'' said Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner of the Michael Werner Galleries, which has spaces in New York and Cologne, Germany, and specializes in a younger generation of German artists like Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz.

About a decade ago, however, Sotheby's and Christie's began holding auctions that were devoted exclusively to German and Austrian art. As prices for such works started rising and the auction houses began marketing the artists internationally, Expressionism slowly developed mainstream appeal.

''Now it's a global market,'' said Guy Bennett, head of Christie's Impressionist and modern art department in New York. ''For the past two years we've seen phenomenal prices for these works.''

On June 20, for example, ''Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II),'' a large 1914 painting that is Egon Schiele's homage to van Gogh's ''Sunflowers,'' sold for $21.6 million at auction in London, nearly twice its $11 million high estimate and a record price for the artist. A day earlier it became known that Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, had paid a staggering $135 million for Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a turn-of-the-20th-century Viennese hostess, on behalf of the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. The Kirchner, the Schiele and the Klimt had all recently been returned to heirs of Jewish European collectors on the ground that the works had been improperly sold or seized under Nazi rule. Many experts had assumed that they would never come up for sale.

Mr. VeneKlasen credits the founding of the five-year-old Neue Galerie, which is devoted entirely to German and Austrian fine and decorative arts, with helping to foster a new appreciation for Expressionism. ''It's had a big effect,'' he said. ''The Neue Galerie made a place for people to understand messy painting.''

''Furthermore people are bored,'' he added. ''They don't want to buy yet another Agnes Martin.''

Mr. Bennett said Kirchner is thought to have painted only 11 canvases of street scenes, and most of them are now in art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

''At the time it was considered daring for an artist to be depicting the seamy world of prostitution in the streets,'' he said. ''He painted prostitutes in their bourgeois clothes with agitated brush strokes and bright colors.''

''Street Scene, Berlin'' had been hanging in the Br? Museum in Berlin since the German government acquired it in 1980. Experts at Christie's said the painting, owned before World War II by Alfred and Thekla Hess, Jewish collectors in Erfurt, Germany, was sent in 1936 along with six others from their collection to the Art Association of Cologne, where it was bought by a Frankfurt collector.

German government officials now say they doubt that the owners were never properly compensated.

After the war the new owners gave it to the St?l Art Institute in Frankfurt, where it remained until the German government bought it for the Br? Museum. The government announced last Thursday that the painting would be returned to the heirs of the prewar owners; Christie's executives say the Kirchner is being sold by heirs of the Hesses.

The Br? is named for a group of Expressionist artists (br? means bridge) that Kirchner helped found in 1905 in Dresden. Opposing the prevailing art establishment, they painted with vivid colors and often graphic brush strokes.

The Nazis condemned Kirchner's work as degenerate' and confiscated 639 of his paintings from museums in 1937. Discouraged, he committed suicide in 1938.